Unreal Tournament hick-ups

[chpco2000]

Hello everyone,
I downloaded the Unreal Tournament demo a few days ago and so far I love the game. It runs very smoothly too, but I have one problem. When I set the screen resolution to 800x600 with 32bit color depth, the game "hick-ups" every few seconds. The framerate is consistent, but every few seconds the game just "skips".

When I run it in 800x600 with 16 bit color depth, the game runs very smoothly without a hitch.
And when I run the game at 640x480 using 32 bit color depth, the gameplay is smoother than a babys bottom!
But why can't I achieve similar results at a slightly higher screen resolution without any hitches?

My system specs are:
1 GHz Athlon
256 megs of DDR PC2100 RAM
20 gig 7200 IBM HD
GeForce 2 MX 200 video card with 32 megs of SDRAM
with Win98

[Tiretool]

Unreal Tournament was never intended to be run in 32 bit color mode, and truthfully, the beauty is so good in 16 bit mode, you won't notice much of a difference. It was written in Glide (the old 3DFX gaming graphics language) and 3DFX video cards only ever did 16 bit Color. Even the latest systems with the fastest processors and huge amounts of ram don't do well with UT and 32 bit color mode. Do yourself a favor and drop your color depth to 16 bit and raise your resolution to at least 1024 X 768. Your eyes will thank you for it!

[dead_eye]

That's why it performs better in openGL mode. Be sure to use that mode instead of d3d.

[Tiretool]

I'd have to disagree... I've played it on two different machines, in both modes, and D3D proves to look better and gives me more FPS. OpenGL support was late to arrive and hasn't matured as much as D3D features have. Unreal 2 should incorporate some advanced OpenGL features that look great in 32 bit color. I can't wait to find out!

[chpco2000]

Thank you Tiretool and Dead Eye. Your responses are greatly appreciated.

Oh and Tiretool, you're right, I can't tell the difference between 32 bit color and 16 bit color in Unreal Tournament. Oh, I also tried that higher resolution you mentioned, and man it looks sweet.

[Xayd]

Even in 16 bit color they did nice things with the dark'ish textures and dynamic lighting in UT. In it's day, it was a graphical masterpiece.

In fact against alot of lazily done games from 2000 and 2001 it still is. Daikitana anyone ?

Only problem is I gotta turn off all the eye candy in UT to see more, competitive edge and all. It looked much better when first installed .

[Lord Prism]

I agree that the visual difference aren't significant, but my Radeon 32MB DDR seems happier when I push it to max resolution with 32bit because I get some smoother play.

[Tiretool]

I'll just agree to disagree.

UT was developed to run in 16 bit color, not 32 bit color. I have yet to see a machine that runs it more smoothly in 32 than 16, and I'd challenge anyone to show me hard evidence that they got more frames per second in 32 than in 16. I just refuse to believe it til I see it.

[chpco2000]

Well, atleast there is a legitimate excuse for UT, but Quake 3 runs horribly on my new comp.
I get like 15-20 frames per second running the game at 800x600 on high quality settings.
GRRR....I have a 1 GHz Athlon w/ 266 MHz FBS, and 256 megs of PC2100 DDR RAM, I should be getting decent framerates atleast.

[Tiretool]

You've got something screwy going on there.. You should easily get over 100 fps with that setup.

Are you running it in OpenGL mode? Are you using the latest version of DirectX and your video card drivers?

Make sure both of these things are current and then report back with your gameing results after upgrading either or both of the two above mentioned items.

[Lord Prism]

Well Tiretool, YOU'RE RIGHT. It's good learn new things.
This time what I did is I started the a START A NEW MULTIPLAYER GAME, then I put 15 BOTS the arena BATTLEROOM, and then ran amock with the 16bit, THEN 32bit and the 32bit was horribly choppy compared to the 16bit. The smoke was better and the explosions had little sparkles, and stuff like that but I there were definately NOT more fps.

[Tiretool]

I'd love to take credit for this... but it's common knowledge that 16 bit play is usually WAY more smooth than 32 bit. You've got to take into consideration... when this game was put together, it was written in the Glide 3D Programming language. This language was the spawn of 3DFX, makers of the Voodoo line of graphics cards. The Voodoo cards, up until the very latest cards (Voodoo 4 and 5) weren't able to do 32 bit color, so it wasn't really their goal to make this game playable in 32bit color. Their aim with Unreal and Unreal Tournament was for people to play on Voodoo cards (and their 16 bit color). Unfortunately, 3DFX never anticipated their early fall into an eternal celestial dirt nap.

[Xayd]

And thank god it was Epic's game and not someone else's. Any other game company would've just let the game die, but Epic kept supporting the folks like Loki who worked on OpenGL and D3D renderers for the game, even a year after the game's release.

They also went the right way with handling those out in the gaming community who made great mods for the game, such as the CSHP guys who worked so hard to destroy cheat bots...they hired them all to work on Unreal2 .

Epic is the model of what a game company should be. Any other Glide game developer would've died with 3dfx.

[chpco2000]

Well, I uninstalled the demo of Quake 3 and then re-installed it. Now I'm getting better results, but not sure if they're up to par.
I mean, I still get choppy framerates when the action heats up running at 800x600 w/32bit color depth on high quality settings.
Also, When I play the game on 1024x768 with high quality settings except 32 bit color depth, I get exceptionally smooth framerates. Even smoother than 800x600!
This has me scratching me head big time.

And yes, I've had the latest drivers since I first built the comp (a month ago) including DX 8.